Home Depot Nears Its 40th Year of Saving Your Money

The Home Depot was founded in the 1970s, specifically to be a hardware and home improvement store that was simply bigger than any of its competitors. This warehouse or ‘big-box’ format was hugely successful, as it created the impression that the Home Depot had absolutely everything you might need for home improvement under one roof – even if, in the early days, they did have to pile up empty boxes to give the impression that they had more product than they really did! The gigantic stores also meant that there was space for in-store ‘workshops’ where customers could be shown exactly how to use the myriad tools on offer. Additionally, employees were given extensive training to be able to identify the customers’ needs and provide them with the products that they needed. Home Depot coupons and promotions helped customers save money while they shopped, too.

Home Depot Tools

The big-box style of the Home Depot blew other home-improvement stores out of the water, forcing them to either adopt a similar format or go bankrupt. Home Depot deals also helped beat their competition, with customers flocking to grab incredible offers. The Home Depot went public three years after it was founded, and has been featured on the FORTUNE 500 list many times since then, most recently at number 29. It now has around two and-a-half thousand stores worldwide, just over two-thousand of which are located in the continental United States.

The Home Depot also has a strong track record of help in the community. As well as providing great training to its customers and employees and, apart from a patch with a CEO who had a different attitude, adopting a genuinely considerate approach to employee morale, the Home Depot has established its own charitable organization. The Home Depot Foundation helps to rebuild and refurnish the homes of poor people through working on its own and through other charities and non-profit organizations.

Home Depot Foundation

In Canada, this same principle of corporate responsibility manifests itself in a number of partnerships with charities operating in Canada and beyond, including Habitat for Humanity, Evergreen, KaBOOM! the Clean Air Foundation and Volunteer Canada. The environment is very important to Home Depot: They have strict internal policy on recycling, the disposal of hazardous materials and their carbon footprint. In line with their long-held principle of social responsibility, they also help educate their customers about how they can change their habits and improve their homes to help sustain the environment for future generations to come.

The Home Depot continues to hold its position as one of the world’s major retailers. They expanded into Canada when they acquired Aikenhead’s Hardware and there has been frequent talk since then of an expansion into the UK or other areas of Europe. Currently, they are the fifth largest retailer of any kind in the world, and the fourth largest in America, giving them enormous market leverage which they use to provide great deals to customers, like a Home Depot 10 off coupon, for example, and strive to improve the environmental record of big business in general.